The Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud. Irving Stone.

The Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud
Irving Stone
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1971.

Why read it? All right. It's a fictionalized biography of Freud, and not one of Stone's best, either. [His best fictionalized novel was Lust for Life on Vincent Van Gogh.] It often does read more like a textbook than a novel. But it does explain Freud's thought in readable prose so that ordinary people like me can understand his ideas. Freud suggested that childhood experiences significantly affected adult lives. Freud, like Lincoln for his defense of the Union, was viciously insulted for his work in describing the reality of human nature. Inhibitions are caused by instinctual drives being repressed by prior training. Freud showed us how much of our rational lives was influenced by the unconscious.

Sample ideas from the novel: "Most cures are based on the work of hundreds of researchers, all of whom make minute contributions." "Professor Theodor Billroth...was...the first with the courage to publish reports on his operations; since surgeons lost more cases than they saved, the reports were macabre reading...." "Failures must be acknowledged, at once and publicly, without glossing over our mistakes; an unsuccessful case is more important to know about than a dozen successful operations." "Neither could there be any question that, although the specialist in internal medicine could make an accurate diagnosis of the symptoms, there was no corresponding body of knowledge of the cure."

"The greatest medicine is nature." "Barney, that specimen you are looking at through your microscope is not a thin slice of a human mind; it's a slice of brain...the brain is a vessel, a physical structure built to contain; the mind is the content: words, ideas, images, beliefs...." "There is a wandering group of neurotics in every city, running to each new doctor in the hopes of miracle cures for non-existent illnesses ... thousands of bright, healthy men and women who need an illness, need a pain." "He [Freud] loved to write, came alive with a pen in his hand...wrote as he breathed, naturally, for writing resolved his ideas and refreshed them."

"Sometimes the resolution to face death gives the courage to face life." "Prejudices are chains." "...awed to hear Charcot as he reasoned out loud, bringing into his analyses similar cases, proposing original theories about the cause and nature of the maladies before him." "Why is it that doctors see only what they have learned to see?" Dr. Josef Breuer: "Our bodies are incredibly intricate machines that could only have been produced by a genius...the greatest work of art on earth." "He was a scientist...one who believed only what could be measured." "The repressed idea takes its revenge...."

Quote. Freud: "I did not invent man; all I am trying to do is to describe him, to find out what makes this most complex and confusing of all animals behave the way he does."